Challenge 73 – Coffee Cup and Peanuts

Thank you so much for being so wonderful, painting our previous challenge and helping in an amazing way to migrate our old blog to this new PADT web site. I know we had a few issues here and there and I would like to thank you sincerely for your patience while we resolved them together.

It is a journey and I am very confident and enthusiastic it will get only better, evolve and help all of us grow and promote art and creativity to the much larger portion of our society.
About the composition

In this challenge I thought it would be an interesting to paint or draw three different textures and surfaces.

One is the outer skin of the unpeeled peanuts. They are quite textured. They have many small hills and valleys which create interesting highlights at the hills and deep dark shadows in the valleys.

The second surface is a very smooth porcelain cup with painted rose design on it. It is as smooth as anything could possibly be, and shaped in an almost conical shape. Even though this surface is very smooth, having the rose painted on it could have looked as if the roses are sitting at the top of the cup, not being part of the design. However it does not. So here is challenge for us. To try to paint the roses so that they look as a painting on the cup, not a physical object sitting in front of the surface. The way to accomplish this is to make the rose edges smoother, especially the outside petals, so that they dissolve into the surface of the cup.

The third surface is coffee liquid in the cup, reflecting light and reading as a liquid, not as a solid object.

How do we know it is a coffee and it is a liquid? If you look carefully, you will see that at the outskirt of the elliptic coffee shape, there is a very tiny ring of liquid in a different paler color that the rest climbing up the walls and creating very subtle highlights. Also, you will notice strong highlights that only liquid or extremely shiny surfaces can produce. Even though the coffee color is dark brown, the highlights on it are light bluish pink due to its very reflective surface.

And let’s also not forget very soft shadows below the surface of the coffee cup and peanuts. Please pay attention how this cast shadows appear very dark close to the object, and then quickly dissipate and almost dissolve into the surrounding white surface.

If you would like to add other objects, or background, you are free to do so and create your own unique composition.
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